Announcing Support for Docker Container Technology as a Platform in 2016.1 Release

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InterSystems is delighted to announce the support of Docker container technology as a platform from the moment 2016.1 will be released.

Docker is a disruptive system technology that has many benefits and offers many advantages for those investing in infrastructure-as-code or immutable-infrastructure provisioning & deployment scenarios.Like any new technology that appears, there is a learning curve, and many considerations need to occur when using it. However, Docker container technology has already proven to be successful by a huge follow-up with many companies already using it in production. Furthermore & FYI, all public cloud providers already support it.

InterSystems validates and supports its technologies on Docker container engine from v1.8 and above with CentOS, Ubuntu, RedHat and SUSE based containers from the official Docker Hub repository or their respective projects and sites.

Will there any academic sessions at global summit with Docker ?
I think it should be, it will be very helpful, to understand how it works with Cache, how possible to deploy applications. I like docker, and think about it, but still do not understand how it can be used with our applications, and how to make container for it, and connect to Cache's container.

Luca, may I ask, what exactly means InterSystems supports Docker now. I have not found anything about docker in documentation in version 2016.1. Actually I see that you already use docker with version 2015, and with 2016 I still have to use ccontainermain. It would be better if we could just use ccontrol for the same functionality as it now used ccontainermain.

@Dimitri, first of all, you don't have to use ccontainermain, you can script your own solution. It's just a quick-start utility. Caché ccontrol -as the name implies, is the database image control process and does many things. None of them are concerned with keeping the container alive which is not -by definition, a Linux distribution.

InterSystems has been testing and running its QD testing suites against Docker containers from the 2nd quarter of 2015. Stating that we support Docker containers means that we support our platform in this environment. However, there are MANY gotchas and anybody interested in "containerizing" their app or more to the point, switching to a micro-service architecture, should approach it as a new platform.

Thanks for the reply Luca, of course, I know that I can write my own script for it, and your ccontainermain it is a very good solution. And it works quite well, and with some my modifications, more informative now. And I hope that I can help to improve this tool.Now I am goid to write an article (in russian yet), about Docker+Caché+HAProxy, not as a micro-service, but with ECP, my containers will work as ECP-Applications with registration on HAProxy. And on github I have some questions which I now faced, when worked on it.

On the article you're working on: we hope you can share it once translated into English so that a wider audience can benefit from your precious work. Depending on how you spin up containers there are a couple of critical areas I'd like you to describe so that we can all learn from each other experiences here:

Data Volumes

Containers are ephemeral and although we can mount host volumes we need to think ahead